Seminar - February 24, 2011

Thursday, February 24, 2011
4:15 pm
Location:  HSEB Room 4100B 

Presented by:

James J. Cimino, MD, FACMI, FACP
Chief, Laboratory for Informatics Development
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center

Biography

Dr. James Cimino is a board certified internist who completed a National Library of Medicine informatics fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, and then went on to an academic position at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He spent 20 years at Columbia, carrying out clinical informatics research, building clinical information systems, teaching medical informatics and medicine, and caring for patients, rising to the rank of full professor in both Biomedical Informatics and Medicine. In 2008, he moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he is the Chief of the Laboratory for Informatics Development and a Senior Investigator at the NIH Clinical Center and the National Library of Medicine. His principle project involves the development of the Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS), a NIH-wide clinical research data resource.

In addition, he conducts clinical informatics research, directs the NLM's postdoctoral training program in clinical informatics, participates in the Clinical Center's Internal Medicine Consult Service, and teaches at Columbia University as an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics. He is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, the American College of Physicians, the American Clinical and Climatological Association, and the New York Academy of Medicine.

Abstract

The NIH Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS) provides NIH investigators with access to intramural clinical research data collected from the many Institutes and Centers where such research is carried out. The data in BTRIS can be accessed in identified form, as they relate to active research protocols, but can also be accessed in de-identified form across 4,900 active and inactive protocols involving over 400,000 research subjects for the past 35 years.

Notable features of BTRIS include a hybrid data model (that represents the commonalities of data from various resources while accommodating the unique features from each), a terminologic ontology (the Research Entities Dictionary, or RED) that unifies the concepts from the various source data systems), and a user interface that allows end users to formulate and execute their own queries (without having to necessarily understand either the data model or the terminology).

This presentation will discuss the ways in which the data in BTRIS are being used, and could be used, to support translational research at the NIH, including the reuse of data to ask new questions and to help design new clinical protocols.